Sponsorship advertising is a considerable and important source of revenue for winter leisure industries, such as hockey, curling and other winter sports franchises, and for the sporting centers in which they play. In the case of a hockey arenas, for example, most or all surfaces suitable for displaying advertising are presently exploited for promotional purposes to generate advertising revenue. Recently, even the arenas' ice sheets have been made available for this purpose.
Advertisements or other markings (e.g. the "blue" and "red" off-side lines) within such ice sheets have been brushed or sprayed directly into the ice using known paints. More ice is then placed over the painted images to protect them. The resultant images are fairly crude because they are either produced free-hand or with the aid of a stencil, and subtle color gradations are not possible. These prior art processes are also labor intensive and time consuming, and so the images can be expensive to produce.
Since such crude images have limited appeal, the fill revenue potential of ice space has not been fully exploited. Therefore, arena operators and advertising sponsors have sought but failed to improve image quality and resultant advertising revenues. Attempts have been made to place sheets of paper or other impermeable materials with better color graphics into ice sheets, with poor or unacceptable results. First, the graphics are not produced using a four color process, and therefore are of relatively poor quality. Rather, a solid color printing method is used without color gradation or sophisticated graphic capabilities, for instance. Second, the sheets either distort or deteriorate into smaller pieces (e.g. like bathroom tissue paper in water). Others tend to trap air and float as water is applied over the sheet. Hence, quite thick top layers of ice must be provided to adequately protect the sheets and prevent cracking or buckling of the ice above the sheet. As a result, such sheets require considerable effort and time to place and remove from the ice sheet.
What is therefore desired is a process of producing and placing full color graphic images within ice sheets which overcomes the limitations and disadvantages of prior ice graphic methods. The invention should provide an easy, relatively quick and cost effective means of creating high quality graphic images on a carrier medium and of placing such images within an ice structure. In particular, the high quality graphic images should be produced on the carrier medium using a four-color (a.k.a. CMYK) printing method. Such graphics, including the carrier medium, should also be capable of relatively easy and quick removal from the ice sheet (for disposal).